Philo Sofee wrote:So is this like a counter posting option to Little Nippers posting the entire bloody freaking Bible on the internet? If so it's a great book you've chosen to share with this Mak...
Thanks, Philo. It's dated and takes on metanarratives that we might not promote now but I think it's interesting.
Philo Sofee wrote:So is this like a counter posting option to Little Nippers posting the entire bloody freaking Bible on the internet? If so it's a great book you've chosen to share with this Mak...
Thanks, Philo. It's dated and takes on metanarratives that we might not promote now but I think it's interesting.
it really is. I think it's bringing out the evidence to analyze the contentions they claim is also interesting. Please tell me you are not mechanically typing all of this out by yourself.
Dr CamNC4Me
"Dr. Peterson and his Callithumpian cabal of BYU idiots have been marginalized by their own inevitable irrelevancy defending a fraud."
Maksutov wrote: Thanks, Philo. It's dated and takes on metanarratives that we might not promote now but I think it's interesting.
it really is. I think it's bringing out the evidence to analyze the contentions they claim is also interesting. Please tell me you are not mechanically typing all of this out by yourself.
I'm cutting and pasting. Fear not.
by the way, the first time I came across this work was at the Harold B. Lee library at BYU.
I posted Paine's Age of Reason before. There are also some great works by Ingersoll that are in public domain.
Ingersoll is the one you ought to be putting out man he is pure spectacular. In fact where can I find them I might actually start cutting and pasting his stuff here that would be a fun exercise in thinking. It would give me a chance to read through his stuff more carefully as well. I am so bored with Zerinus and his testimony in the terrestrial area, I'm ready to move on to something significant and useful.
Dr CamNC4Me
"Dr. Peterson and his Callithumpian cabal of BYU idiots have been marginalized by their own inevitable irrelevancy defending a fraud."
In other parts of Europe desperate attempts were made even later to save the letter of our sacred books by the re- vival of a theory in some respects more striking. To shape this theory to recent needs, vague reminiscences of a text in Job regarding fire beneath the earth, and vague conceptions of speculations made by Humboldt and Laplace, were min- gled with Jewish tradition. Out of the mixture thus obtained Schubert developed the idea that the Satanic '' principalities and powers " formerly inhabiting our universe plunged it into the chaos from which it was newly created by a process accurately described in Genesis. Rougemont made the earth one of the " morning stars " of Job, reduced to chaos by Lucifer and his followers, and thence developed in ac- cordance with the nebular hypothesis. Kurtz evolved from this theor}^ an opinion that the geological disturbances were caused by the opposition of the devil to the rescue of our universe from chaos by the Almighty. Delitzsch put a simi- lar idea into a more scholastic jargon ; but most desperate of all w^ere the statements of Dr. Anton Westermeyer, of Munich, in T/ie Old Testament viudieated from Modern Infidel Objectio7is. The following passage will serve to show his * See Gosse, Omphalos, London, 1857, p. 5, and passim ; and for a passage giving the keynote of the whole, with a most farcical note on coprolites, see pp. 353, 354.
ideas: *' By the fructifying brooding of the Divine Spirit on the waters of the deep, creative forces began to stir; the devils who inhabited the primeval darkness and considered it their own abode saw that they were to be driven from their possessions, or at least that their place of habitation was to be contracted, and they therefore tried to frustrate God's plan of creation and exert all that remained to them of might and power to hinder or at least to mar the new creation." So came into being " the horrible and destruc- tive monsters, these caricatures and distortions of creation," of which we have fossil remains. Dr. Westermeyer goes on to insist that " whole generations called into existence by God succumbed to the corruption of the devil, and for that reason had to be destroyed " ; and that " in the work of the six days God caused the devil to feel his power in all ear- nest, and made Satan's enterprise appear miserable and vain." *
Such was the last important assault upon the strongholds of geological science in Germany ; and, in view of this and others of the same kind, it is little to be wondered at that when, in 1870, Johann Silberschlag made an attempt to again base geology upon the Deluge of Noah, he found such diffi- culties that, in a touching passage, he expressed a desire to get back to the theory that fossils were '' sports of Na- ture."
But the most noted among efforts to keep geology well within the letter of Scripture is of still more recent date. In the year 1885 Mr. Gladstone found time, amid all his labours and cares as the greatest parliamentary leader in England, to take the field in the struggle for the letter of Genesis against geology.
On the face of it his effort seemed Quixotic, for he con- fessed at the outset that in science he was " utterly destitute of that kind of knowledge which carries authority," and his argument soon showed that this confession was entirely true.
But he had some other qualities of which much might be expected : great skill in phrase-making, great shrewdness in adapting the meanings of single words to conflicting necessities in discussion, wonderful power in erecting showv structures of argument upon the smallest basis of fact, and a facility almost preternatural in " explaining away " trouble- some realities. So striking was his power in this last respect, that a humorous London chronicler once advised a bigamist, as his only hope, to induce Mr. Gladstone to explain away one of his wives.
At the basis of this theologico-geological structure Mr. Gladstone placed what he found in the text of Genesis : '' A grand fourfold division " of animated Nature " set forth in an orderly succession of times." And he arranged this order and succession of creation as follows : '' First, the water popu- lation ; secondly, the air population ; thirdly, the land popu- lation of animals ; fourthly, the land population consummated in man."
His next step was to slide in upon this basis the appar- ently harmless proposition that this division and sequence is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by nat- ural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclu- sion and established fact."
Finally, upon these foundations he proceeded to build an argument out of the coincidences thus secured between the record in the Hebrew sacred books and the truths revealed by science as regards this order and sequence, and he easily arrived at the desired conclusion with which he crowned the whole structure, namely as regards the writer of Genesis, that " his knowledge was divine." *
Such was the skeleton of the structure ; it was abun- dantly decorated with the rhetoric in which Mr. Gladstone is so skillful an artificer, and it towered above " the average man " as a structure beautiful and invincible — like some Chi- nese fortress in the nineteenth century, faced with porcelain and defended with crossbows.
Its strength was soon seen to be unreal. In an essay ad- mirable in its temper, overwhelming in its facts, and abso- lutely convincing in its argument, Prof. Huxley, late Presi- dent of the Royal Society, and doubtless the most eminent contemporary authority on the scientific questions con- cerned, took up the matter.
Mr. Gladstone's first proposition, that the sacred writings give us a great "fourfold division" created " in an orderly succession of times," Prof. Huxley did not presume to gainsay.
As to Mr. Gladstone's second proposition, that '' this great fourfold division . . . created in an orderly succession of times . . . has been so affirmed in our own time by nat- ural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated con- clusion and established fact," Prof. Huxley showed that, as a matter of fact, no such '' fourfold division " and '* orderly succession " exist ; that, so far from establishing Mr. Glad- stone's assumption that the population of water, air, and land followed each other in the order given, " all the evidence we possess goes to prove that they did not " ; that the distribu- tion of fossils through the various strata proves that some land animals originated before sea •animals ; that there has been a mixing of sea, land, and air " population " utterly de- structive to the ''great fourfold division " and to the creation " in an orderly succession of times " ; that, so far is the view presented in the sacred text, as stated by Mr. Gladstone, from having been " so affirmed in our own time by natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact " that Mr. Gladstone's assertion is " di- rectly contradictory to facts known to every one who is ac- quainted with the elements of natural science " ; that Mr. Gladstone's only geological authority, Cuvier, had died more than fifty years before, when geological science was in its infancy [and he might have added, when it was necessary to make every possible concession to the Church] ; and, finally, he challenged Mr. Gladstone to produce any contem- porary authority in geological science who would support his so-called scriptural view. And when, in a rejoinder, Mr. Gladstone attempted to support his view on the authority of Prof. Dana, Prof. Huxley had no difficulty in showing from Prof. Dana's works that Mr. Gladstone's inference was ut- terly unfounded.
But, while the fabric reared by Mr. Gladstone had been thus undermined by Huxley on the scientific side, another opponent began an attack from the biblical side. The Rev. Canon Driver, professor at Mr. Gladstone's own Uni- versity of Oxford, took up the question in the light of scrip- tural interpretation. In regard to the comparative table drawn up by Sir J. W. Dawson, showing the supposed correspondence between the scriptural and the geological order of creation. Canon Driver said : *' The two series are evidently at variance. The geological record contains no evidence of clearly defined periods corresponding to the 'days ' of Genesis. In Genesis, vegetation is complete two days before animal life appears. Geology shows that they appear simultaneously — even if animal life does not appear first. In Genesis, birds appear together with aquatic crea- tures, and precede all land animals ; according to the evi- dence of geology, birds are unknown till a period much later than that at which aquatic creatures (including fishes and amphibia) abound, and they are preceded by numerous spe- cies of land animals — in particular, by insects and other ' creeping things.' " Of the Mosaic account of the existence of vegetation before the creation of the sun, Canon Driver said, *' No reconciliation of this representation with the data of science has yet been found " ; and again : " From all that has been said, however reluctant we may be to make the ad- mission, only one conclusion seems possible. Read without prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis i. creates an im- pression at variance with the facts revealed by science." The eminent professor ends by saying that the efforts at reconciliation are " different modes of obliterating the char- acteristic features of Genesis, and of reading into it a view which it does not express."
Thus fell Mr. Gladstone's fabric of coincidences between the " great fourfold division " in Genesis and the facts ascer- tained by geology. Prof. Huxley had shattered the scien- tific parts of the structure. Prof. Driver had removed its biblical foundations, and the last great fortress of the opponents of unfettered scientific investigation was in ruins.
In opposition to all such attempts we may put a noble utterance by a clergyman who has probably done more to save what is essential in Christianity among English-speak- ing people than any other ecclesiastic of his time. The late Dean of Westminster, Dr. Arthur Stanley, was widely known and beloved on both continents. In his memorial sermon after the funeral of Sir Charles Lyell he said : '' It is now clear to diligent students of the Bible that the first and second chapters of Genesis contain two narratives of the creation side by side, differing from each other in almost every particular of time and place and order. It is well known that, when the science of geology first arose, it was involved in endless schemes of attempted reconciliation with the letter of Scripture. There were, there are perhaps still, two modes of reconciliation of Scripture and science, which have been each in their day attempted, and each has totally and deservedly failed. One is the endeavor to wrest the words of the Bible from their natural meaning and force it to speak the language of science:' And again, speaking of the earliest known example, which was the interpolation of the word "" not " in Leviticus xi, 6, he continues : ** This is the earliest instance of the falsification of Scripture to meet the de- mands of science ; and it has been followed in later times by the various efforts which have been made to twist the earlier chapters of the book of Genesis into apparent agreement with the last results of geology — representing days not to be days, morning and evening not to be morning and even- ing, the Deluge not to be the Deluge, and the ark not to be the ark."
